How do we know about these climate changes?
Through a new generation of paleoclimatic studies that involve a whole range of different climatic proxies; ice cores, deep sea and lake cores, tree-rings, cave deposits, and much more. Climatology has become a sophisticated multidisciplinary science in recent years, and computer modeling is changing the ways in which we look both at future climate and global warming. Computer models for tropical droughts in the future are truly frightening.
What about the natural cycles of climate?
There have been at least nine glacial episodes over the past three quarters of a million years. The world’s climate has been in transition from cold to warmer and back for three quarters of this time. The past 10,000 years since the last Ice Age have been the longest relatively stable period over the past 400,000 years. If natural cycles continue, then we will one day revert to glacial conditions. The question of questions revolves around whether humanly caused global warming will override the cycle. No on knows.
You’re an archaeologist. How does archaeology fit into the story?
Archaeology is the only scientific discipline that allows us to study changing human societies over long periods of time, centuries and millennia earlier than written records. Archaeology is our primary source of information about Maya civilization, hunter-gatherers in North America, the Chimu of Peru, and Polynesian islanders, and is a mine of information about the Norse of Greenland and medieval Europeans. The story of the Medieval Warming Period comes from all manner of sources, some of them archaeological, others from subjects as esoteric as wind patterns and cod bones.
What got you into ancient climate change in the first place?
A long interest in environment and ancient societies started me off, kindled by the late Professor Grahame Clark at Cambridge University when I was an undergraduate. He was an ecological pioneer. When El Niños hit the headlines in the 1980s, and I became involved in some archaeology in the Southwestern United States, I decided to look into the subject from a general perspective. My first climatic book was on El Niños, and that led to the sequence of books, of which this is the fourth.
What was the most striking research you encountered during the writing of the book?
Without question, it was Kim Cobb’s research on ancient coral rings from tiny Palmyra Island in the middle of nowhere in the Pacific. Her climatic researches, highly local although they may be, provided all kinds of drought links for me. Lovely stuff!
What do you see as the major advance of the next decade?
The development of sophisticated tree-ring grids that will provide us with fine-grained climatic links between areas as widely separated as the Andes and northern Europe.
What book are you planning to write next?
I am still undecided, but climate change will obviously play some role in it.
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